Fail Whale: Twitter Suffered Another Outage (Update 2)

Written by: Chris Ciaccia01/31/13 - 3:58 PM EST

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Updated from 10:53 a.m. EST to provide company comments in the sixth paragraph.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Fail Whale. Again.

Twitter is suffering another outage, this time with its application programming interface (API). Users who use popular Twitter apps such as Hoot Suite, Echofon, and others are experiencing problems sending and receiving messages. Twitter's own status read, "Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing -- we're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon."

The last major outage by Twitter was in June, when the social network blamed the cause on a "cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components."

When the site crashes and users are unable to access it, a whale appears on the Web site, which users refer to as the "Fail Whale."

Twitter has increased drastically in popularity, as the world's online audience seeks to engage with one another, and they look for alternatives to other social networks, including Facebook (FB) , which reported fourth-quarter results Wednesday

In an update to the company blog, Twitter said the issue was fixed. "We experienced intermittent issues affecting web and mobile users, globally, between approximately 7:00am and 9:50am PST.

"This incident has now been resolved. We apologize to users who were affected by this, and we're working to ensure that similar issues do not occur."